Roadwork: Offstage with Special Drama Actresses in Tamilnadu, South India

Seizer, Susan

doi:10.1525/can.2000.15.2.217

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is absolutely necessary as it is a possible future scenario for a young male like M. S. In this sense, an appeal to the reality of the movie licenses showing what would otherwise be transgressive and vulgar. This asymmetry in identification with the hero and not the heroine is consistent with the observation that while male characters are often identified with by viewers, the conditions under which viewers identify with heroines are complicated by the perceived immorality of what their characters sometimes do on screen and stereotypes about what kinds of people actresses are (see Mishra 1999:266;Seizer 2002Seizer [2000; Osella and Osella 2004:244-5). And given that the chastity of Tamil women is taken as an emblem of "Tamil culture" (Anandhi 2005), this gender asymmetry gets reflected in the frequency with which the heroines (e.g., in 7G, M. Kumuran: Son of Mahalakshmi, punnakai mannan) and actresses (e.g., Asin, Jothika, Khusboo, Simran, Sneha, Sonia Agrawal) in Tamil films are not Tamil.…”

Section: Talk About 7gsupporting

confidence: 76%

Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema

Nakassis¹,

Dean²

2007

J Linguistic Anthropol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article first examines representations of women's desire in Tamil cinema, from highly implicit and non-transgressive representations of desire in an older movie to linguistically explicit and transgressive representations of desire in a recent hit movie. We then examine how such contemporary filmic representations are related to what we call a mode of realist spectatorship, and how this mode of spectatorship is linked to a particular social group (male youth) and to film form. We argue that the emergence of this mode of spectatorship, the films associated with it, and their connection to male youth are due to changes in the film market and to differential socialization by generation. Finally, we argue for realism in film as holding when film form and spectatorship are highly calibrated in the following way: some set of filmic representations are evaluated by viewers and filmmakers through culturally mediated classifications of "real" and "unreal" which are operationalized truth-functionally in events of evaluation; such representations presuppose these classifications, and by virtue of regular presupposition can entail an experience of "reality" for viewers. [anthropology of the media, realism, spectatorship, Indian cinema, Tamil Nadu]

show abstract

Section: Talk About 7gsupporting

confidence: 76%

Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema

Nakassis¹,

Dean²

2007

J Linguistic Anthropol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The first period stretched from June through July 1999, and the second, from August 2000 through August 2001. In this period, I traveled across various villages with Jana Sanskriti theatre teams for performances and activist work (Radway 1988;Seizer 2002). Apart from the frequent travel, I also spent one-to two-week stretches in a village called Tarinipur in 24 Parganas (south) because Jana Sanskriti claimed this to be their site of success.…”

Section: The Research Process and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining Community

Mohan

2004

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article offers an ethnographic exploration of a grassroots cultural organization called Jana Sanskriti (People’s Culture) working in rural Bengal, India. This political theatre and activist work offstage is oppositional practice that presents participants with a significant space for self-organization. Jana Sanskriti’s work enables the author to engage and push the boundaries of symbolic interactionism because their performances, role-playing, and rehearsals are more than metaphors for social construction, identity formation, and subjective transformation. For eighteen years, Jana Sanskriti’s theatre has offered a significant opportunity for people to script power relations onstage and live new commitments offstage. The author shows how people learn from, make sense of, and live the consequences of immediate, onstage interactions and experiences in their offstage lives. This story traces people’s experience with and commitment to particular practices of interactions unique to the Jana Sanskriti community as evidence that representations can be an engine of transformation.

show abstract

“…Subjected to the gaze of many men, they belong not to one, like the loyal wife, but to all. Seizer (2010), looking at women in special drama in Tamil Nadu, talked about how performing women automatically get categorized as 'bad' because they are exposed to the 'gaze' of men outside their families. The performers and the audience belong to the lower strata and the women performers have often chosen this road due to extreme poverty.…”

Section: Contrast Between the Day And Night Life Of A Performing Artistmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ki sambandha hoibe takhon he?: Locating Nachnis in the Societal Margins of Kinship in Rural Bengal

Sengupta

Narasimhan

2020

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Na_chni na_ch, a dance form of West Bengal, is going through a difficult time in its 500-year history. The woman dancer, who is known as a nachni, performs, often at night, along with her male partner, or rasik. Her life is intricately tied with that of her rasik, which includes her status as a woman performer at public events and the observance of proper rituals upon her death. Caught in a web of exploitation, the nachni essentially has no ‘kin’. Following the work by Inden and Nicholas on Bengali kinship and its categories and meanings within Bengali culture, this article looks at the amorphous pattern of kinship for the marginalized, with a special focus on the daily lives of nachnis. It explores the networks on the margins of kinship in which women performers of this crisis-ridden folk-art form survive.

show abstract

Roadwork: Offstage with Special Drama Actresses in Tamilnadu, South India

Cited by 8 publications

References 6 publications

Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema

Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema

Reimagining Community

Ki sambandha hoibe takhon he?: Locating Nachnis in the Societal Margins of Kinship in Rural Bengal

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About